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Let it be known, long and far across all distant lands. This blog is totally independant from Microsoft and any other company or organisation and this blog (not the people) is not affiliated with Microsoft at all.

Youâ€™ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, hereâ€™s an overview of what youâ€™ll find in IE8.

We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what weâ€™ve called â€˜trustworthyâ€™ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

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The newer version of Internet Explorer 7 will comes without WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) validation, means piated Windows will be able to download and install IE7. This decision was made to protect even the pirated Windows from being attacked.

The different languages of IE7 will be released base on the following schedule:

IEAK7 w/ MSI installer (language availability timeline is the same as above)

4-Oct-07

Automatic Update Rollout

WU/AU/WSUS – Ongoing rollout will vary by geography

This version of IE7 contains the following new improvements:

Â Â Â Â Â Â Expanded availability to Windows PC users – removed WGA validation requirementÂ Â Â Â Â Â The Menu bar will be turned on by defaultÂ Â Â Â Â Â For first time users, the first-run experience includes a new, easily accessible overviewÂ Â Â Â Â Â For all users, the online Internet Explorer 7 tour has been updated to include how-toâ€™s on great new features like tabbed browsing.Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Microsoft has also included a new MSI installer for enterprises that simplifies deployment for customers. IT Administrators can tailor to their organizationâ€™s needs by using the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and deploy the package to relevant units within their organization using e.g. Group Policies or Systems Management Server (SMS). If you need support for Internet Explorer 7, the support details are as following:

Basically, it will attempt to use Javascript to cough up information about ones’ browser details, eg: version of browser, what plugins are running/enabled, location of the machine, internal IP of the machine etc.

However on a Vista with IE7 running, “Access denied” error will be shown. This is because Vista + IE7 has Javascript disabled by default.

It’s taken me many hours to get this finally going – but a knowledge base is now complete of which you can put your input in on any article – leave a comment, leave a reply, ask questions then get answersÂ – it’s a real knowledge base where your input gets easily submitted back to me for improvements.

Leave a reply and get a response

Comment on each individual post

Comment on each demonstration

Fully Firefox compatible

Mobile site coming soon

It’s what you all asked me to do – so I did it. To make it easy for existing users, it still looks pretty much exactly the same – but waiting times for articles to load are slashed to a fraction of the time as before. Big thanks to Dean and Oliver who helped with the backend stuff behind it (as I’m not so good at that!). The old URL still works, but it’ll redirect to here where the real magic is – so check it out!

IE7 recently received a minor but welcome update this week, with a patch improving the speed of the built-in phishing filter. If you haven’t used IE7 yet, it’s filter is similar to other browsers filters in that it will scan a page to look for common fraud attempts, but was known to make a PC fairly slow when it attempted to scan multiple pages at once. Now that IE supports tabbed browsing, that’s much more likely to occur. This update addresses that issue, though it still relies on the underlying principle of checking a server-side list of known bad sites.This patch isn’t pushed to your PC, and instead must be downloaded from Microsoft’s site. If you are using IE7 there’s no reason not to get it!

The top two browsing programs of net users got a big update this month as Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Mozilla unleashed Firefox 2.0. Here we take a quick spin through some of the features to be seen in the new versions.

Both browsers offer ease of surfing

Microsoft’s IE7 program is the beefier of the two browsers with the download package weighing in at 14.8 megabytes (MB). By contrast Firefox is a svelte 5.4MB. However, neither should tax a broadband connection. Differences start to show up once the software is downloaded. Once it is done installing, IE7 demands a re-start before you can use it. Firefox installs without that need. It’s a minor difference and a minor inconvenience for those that choose Internet Explorer.

Both take about the same amount of time to install and get started-up but once they are running more subtle differences start to become apparent. At first glance Firefox 2.0 looks more familiar as its main page layout hardly differs from earlier versions. But IE7 does look changed because, for a start, the grey menu bar is hidden. It can be resurrected by hitting the “alt” key but you might be surprised by how much you need to call on it when you can’t find it.

Hidden information

With IE7 Microsoft has brought tabs to its browser but both deals with them in slightly different ways. With IE7 a blank tab is always available but with Firefox the new tab only appears, and takes up some screen space, when you open one up.

IE7 has a neat feature that lets you see thumbnails of all of the tabs you have open at any one time, letting you leap to the one you need with a click. However, it seems to take a moment longer than Firefox 2.0 to close tabs when you are done with them. Opening up quite a few webpageâ€™s in each browser shows up another quirk. Firefox 2.0 seems to do a better job of using the text that webpageâ€™s use to describe themselves.

Often in IE7, the only information you get about a webpage you have open but hidden on the bottom taskbar is “http://” – the rest of the title is obscured. Again, a minor difference and a minor niggle – searching a webpage is still more elegant in Firefox 2.0 than IE7.

Calling up the search function in Firefox prompts the appearance of a text box tied to the bottom of the page and typing your search term in that takes you to the first appearance of that word or phrase on the page – provided it is there, of course. In IE searching calls up a floating box in which you have to type your text and then click or hit a key to find the term or phrase.

Feeding frenzy

One of the very useful inclusions in Firefox 2.0 is a live spell checker that watches over your metaphorical shoulder as you type text into any field on any webpage. It is possible to add a similar function to IE7 but only via an add-on. It will be interesting to see how many people download and install it. When it comes to RSS – the system that feeds updates of webpageâ€™s to those interested – Firefox 2.0 does a slightly better job of making it easy to subscribe to new feeds.

With only a click it was possible to add a feed to popular blog-following sites such as Bloglines to IE7 and Firefox. Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 also benefit from thousands of plug-ins, or add-ons – that can be installed to add more functionality to the browser. These range from RSS readers to Instant Messaging clients, Voice over IP programs, and mini iTunes controls – all accessed from inside the web browser page.

Finally, both IE7 and Firefox 2.0 have introduced systems that warn users when they are about to visit a site that is known to be used by phishing gangs. These pages are made to look like that of a bank to trick people into handing over confidential information. Firefox handles this by updating a locally held list of known phishing sites every time you use the browser.

Microsoft’s IE7 checks in via the web to make sure a site is safe to visit. In the short tests run by the BBC news website, IE7 occasionally took longer to load a page as it carried out a check to see if it was a phishing site. Despite these minor differences, Firefox 2.0 and IE7 are now broadly comparable – something that could not be said of IE6 and Firefox. But it will be up to users to choose which one best meets their needs.

This as you can see is the About box for Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista respectively. As we know, IE7 was released to manufacturing last week and released to the general public, at build number 7.0.5730.11 which means version 7, the 0 is irrelevant, 5730 means how many re-compiles of the software there have been, but as it was based on Internet Explorer 6 SP2, it’s essentially the final build number minus the original one – and the 11 is the sub-build number meaning how many times that build 5730 has been re-compiled.

Lovely, glad we got that sorted.

However… as IE7 was released and the build number fixed at 5730, why on Earth is the build number still increasing on Windows Vista? Checking Vista 5808 (which has been released to TAP testers), the build for IE7 there is 5808 as well. It seems that the build number of Vista transponds to the build number in IE7 for Windows Vista. I’m awfully confused…

Once again there is a browser vulnerability that allows for the remote execution of code. And the only action necessary to become infected is to view a malicious webpage using Internet Explorer or an HTML formatted e-mail.

Like the WMF exploit it is advised to unregister the susceptible dll from the system as a workaround for the vulnerability.

To unregister the dll you should execute from Start, Run:regsvr32 /u “%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\VGX\vgx.dll”

This differs slightly from Microsoft’s recommendation – so as to include localized versions of Windows.

The vgx.dll component solely handles Vector Markup Language (VML). VML is a description format for browsers to draw vector graphics. Not too many websites use this format today – but rather display plain images. Also – it’s only supported by Internet Explorer. Opera and Firefox implement Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Use this link with IE to see an example of VML. If you have the dll registered, you’ll see a clock. Once unregistered, you shouldn’t see anything.

Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail client is also potentially vulnerable for this exploit. But fortunately e-mail is treated as if from Restricted Sites by default, where Binary and Scripting Behaviors is disabled. By using a web-mail client and Internet Explorer you might still be vulnerable.

Update:There’s an unsupported third party patch for the VML vulnerability available at ZERT. (untested)

But it’s good to know something is available if this VML thingy really gets out of hand (which it hasn’t yet).

Updated to add: Your mileage may vary – this patch might not work with everyone. See discussion at PC Doctor Guides.

Sorry if this is really widely known knowledge but something rather useless I’ve found… or something potentially rather cool.

If you go to Start, Run, and type in iexplore then you can directly navigate to a webpage. Essentially, the iexplore bit is the equivilant of http://. That’s the useless bit.

If you type in iexplore but instead of typing in a web address, you can open up Internet Explorer to an FTP folder. If I typed in iexplore ftp.microsoft.com then basically it’ll open up the FTP folder for Microsoft.

I guess we learn something new everyday :)… and you’ve all learned I’m a total n00b 😛

Here we go folks – hot off the presses, Windows Internet Explorer hits Release Candidate 1 at build 5700, and yes this means that there are daily builds of Windows Vista running at 5700 at least but big wow… Vista RC1 won’t be anywhere near 5700, just to clarify!